Thursday, August 14, 2008

As the Future Catches You

I have been reading this book and it has interesting themes and subthemes. The major theme of the book is that poverty is caused by lack of education. This seems like a logical conclusion until you consider politics and economic data on top of it. Consider the African nations and the Middle East, countries that are in turmoil. Look at China and other "conflict countries" where the top engineers are jumping to other countries which allow original thinking. Consider lip-syncing because the child is not representative of the country as in the opening ceremonies; or the questions on the age of the gymnastics team of China.

The book concentrates on the knowledge and science information. I remember a few years ago when there was a project that went to schools to interest girls in science. This was a very successful project but has since run out of funding. If the US is to compete in the next 10-15 years investing in science education would be the best investment that could be made. Why? The Olympics get a lot of press, but the advances in sciences gets little or no attention but create a lot of wealth. However, science is creating new opportunities in every genre, i.e. Chemistry, BioInformatics, Nano-technology, Artificial Intelligence and future innovation.

I would like to be at the forefront of these technologies and have the research grants to do this type of innovation. Our world could be the Utopia that was Star Trek where there is no monetary gain from working, but it is a global economy the invests in education for all and technology benefits everyone.

Artificial Intelligence

I have been finding a lot of applications of artificial intelligence that is highly funded for research in labs. University of Arizona has a AI lab that has funding to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Dr. H. Chen is developing applications for law enforcement that can detect terrorist activity in many genre's such as CopLink application that can collect information from many different law enforcement agencies and put it together to solve crimes.

These applications use intelligent agents and neural networks to gather information from the sources, i.e. internet and databases, then using the complex event processing algorithms gather the information and analyze for the intelligence. The intelligent agents will be used in Web 3.0 to get the right travel reservation without the user digging through hundreds of offers. This sound too good to be true, but it is only a few years away.

More later....

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Changing my Blog site

I decided to add the You Tube spot after watching Johnny Lee and his WII remote video. I will try to create a video of my own and post it as well. Do you suppose that the small demonstration by Johnny Lee will be the beginning of the Holodeck from Star Trek? It seems feasible once you plot all the dots in LED light. Not sure where I'm going with this but is an idea.

Anyway I signed up for the technology You Tube videos so they might not be very good, but then again will be interesting to see.

Carol

Failed Predictions and Technology



With the amount of communication we have today it is tough to go back to 1961 and remember a different time when there were wires all over the place for telecomunications. The Internet was not even an embryo at this time. Space travel was a race between the Soviets and US since Sputnik had flown in space. Satellites were in their infancy. Today the massive amount and the differenet uses of them could not have been dreamt by the 1961 FCC Commissioner.


http://science.howstuffworks.com/satellite1.htm


Sputnik 1 the first satellite



“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” — T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961 (the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965).

To think that we use Satellites for many applications today that were predicted to fail. Television and movies in every home, radio, internet and spying are all applications satellites are used for today.


How satellites are launched into orbit.



Here are some more quotes the the Satellite have overcome.


“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.


“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical (sic) and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” - Simon Newcomb; The Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk 18 months later.

“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.” -– Charlie Chaplin, actor, producer, director, and studio founder, 1916

“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” — New York Times, 1936.

“Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” — Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948.

These are a few of the missed predictions. There are many more at this site.

http://listverse.com/history/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/



Class in Second Life Tues 8/5

Creating objects seems to get easier as you learn more about the vectors and setting to use with the objects. Experimenting can help you create even more out of this world objects in SL. I enjoyed out discussion on Truth and Myth last night. It really was a nice hour + to spend on a Tuesday. It surprises me how tired I get in the Virtual World. My connection kept breaking up on me though, need a new cable on my router.

My description of the Virtual computer might develop a little differently taking one or two applications and being able to get their tough points and visually see them in the VW will be interesting enough. I have to come up with the shapes of the objects to better visualize what they will do.